Absorbed in the problems that we have in our daily routine, we often 
forget about the environment and all creature in it. Nevertheless there 
are people whose work is to analyze and study the follow-on of the 
environment, the life of  animals in it, their migration and population. 
One very common question is how human actions affect the environment and 
the creatures living in it. Is there some relationship between different 
kinds of animals and where could we find a certain species?

Our goal was to provide a simple but powerful visualization to support 
the work of such people like analysts, biologists, birders and amateur 
naturalists, educators, researchers and any kind of organizations that 
are interested in the population, movement and migration of the animals 
over time. For this purpose our first task was to find an interesting 
and large data set that provides this kind of information. Few sources 
on the web were interesting for us, but the one that completely 
corresponds to our requirement was the data set provided by the Avian 
Knowledge Network. The data set contains 14,290,676 bird observations, 
in 142,729 locations, collected from January 1900 to July 2008, and have 
information about 4017 different kinds of birds. The only information 
that the data set did not provide was an image and a description of each 
species, however both are easily obtained from Wikipedia.

Since the data set was to large (11GB), and it contains a lot of 
additional information about the observation groups and collectors that 
was not needed for our task, we decided to remove this part. In spite of 
this the data set was still too big. On the other hand, our 
visualization should provide information over a long period of time, 
which is why we were not interested in a species that appears less than 
20,000 times in the observation data set. The resulting subset was still 
too large to handle efficiently, so we reduced it further for the sake 
of performance. Finally, we obtain a data set sized about 6MB with 35,000 
observations, which was absolutely ideal for our requirements.

